He answered with grave kindness, “I know it was hard for you to quite trust me then, for to trust such violence needs to understand, and I take it that you do not, that you cannot, trust me now, for you do not yet understand. And there may be more times when I shall want you to trust when you cannot, and may not, and must not yet understand. But the time will come when your trust shall be whole and complete in me, and when you shall understand as though the sunlight himself shone through. Then you shall bless me from first to last for your own sake, and for the sake of others, and for her dear sake to whom I swore to protect.”

When these [biblical] stories are interpreted, though, not as reports of historic fact, but as merely imagined episodes onto history, and when they are recognised, then, as analogous to like projections produced elsewhere, in China, India, Yucatán, the import becomes obvious; namely, that although false and to be rejected as accounts of physical history, such universally cherished figures of the mythic imagination must represent facts of the mind: “facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter,” as my friend the late Maya Deren once phrased the mystery. And whereas it must, of course, be the task of the historian, archaeologist, and prehistorian to show that the myths are as facts untrue—that there is no one Chosen People of God in this multiracial world, no Found Truth to which we all must bow, no One and Only True Church—it will be more and more, and with incasing urgency, the task of the psychologist and comparative mythologist not only to identify, analyse, and interpret the symbolised “facts of the mind,” but also to evolve techniques for retaining these in health and, as the old traditions of the fading past dissolve, assist mankind to a knowledge and appreciation of our own inward, as well as the world’s outward, orders of fact.

I’m tired of being me
And I don’t like what I see
I’m not who I appear to be
So I start off every day
Down on my knees I will pray
For a change in any way
But as the day goes by
I live through another lie
If it’s any wonder why